Kenny K K Ng
Kenny Kwok Kwan NG obtained his PhD from Harvard University (East Asian Languages and Civilizations), and had studied in the Comparative Literature doctoral program at the University of Washington (Seattle) and the summer program at the School of Criticism and Theory of Cornell University before his study at Harvard. He has taught a variety of subjects in Chinese humanities, comparative literature, film culture, photography, and cultural studies at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the Open University of Hong Kong, City University of Hong Kong, and Hong Kong Baptist University. His book, Li Jieren, Geopoetic Memory, and the Crisis of Writing Chengdu in Revolutionary China (Brill, 2015) seeks to challenge official historiography and rewrite Chinese literary history from the ground up by highlighting the importance of cultural geography and historical memory. His ongoing book projects concern censorship and visual cultural politics in Cold War China and Asia. He looks into the historical transnational relationships between Hong Kong cinema to mainland China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia so as to map out twentieth-century Chinese cultural history from trans-regional and interdisciplinary perspectives. He has published widely in the fields of comparative literature, Chinese literary and cultural studies, cinema and visual culture in the U.S., UK and Europe, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. His research interests are broad and dynamic, which include history and politics in literature and culture, the relationships between literary and visual studies, vernacular literature and urban culture, colonial cultural history, and comparative literature.
Research Interests:
Film Censorship and Colonial Cultural History
Historical Imagination and Cultural Geography
Transnational Cinema and Visual Culture
Urban Culture and Globalization
Cultural Memory and Heritage
Critical Theory and Aesthetics
Comparative Literary Studies
Research Interests:
Film Censorship and Colonial Cultural History
Historical Imagination and Cultural Geography
Transnational Cinema and Visual Culture
Urban Culture and Globalization
Cultural Memory and Heritage
Critical Theory and Aesthetics
Comparative Literary Studies
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Books by Kenny K K Ng
The book recasts censorship from a repressive-inhibiting force to a productive drive that regenerates new symbolism, audiovisual sensuality, figures of speech, and betrayal of norms in cinematic representation. Combining archival research, historical contextualization, and textual exegesis, it probes the interplay of film form, state ideology, and cultural agency, examining how filmmakers could get around the rules to unveil forbidden messages or sentiments. The study covers spy warfare and conspiracies, gods and monsters, repression and eros, revolution and violence, articulated in opera film, lyrical cinema, melodrama, ghost story, espionage, romantic comedy, realist drama, and revolutionary documentary. It charts the uneven paths of artists like Sit Kok-sin, Cai Chusheng, Fei Mu, Lee Sun-fung, Lee Tit, Ng Cho-fan, Bai Jingrui, Wang Tong, Tang Shu-shuen, Lee Bik-wah, Tsui Hark, Eileen Chang, and Michelangelo Antonioni, who contested the identity of Chineseness through engaging in the cinema of offense.
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Book Projects by Kenny K K Ng
Papers by Kenny K K Ng
The book recasts censorship from a repressive-inhibiting force to a productive drive that regenerates new symbolism, audiovisual sensuality, figures of speech, and betrayal of norms in cinematic representation. Combining archival research, historical contextualization, and textual exegesis, it probes the interplay of film form, state ideology, and cultural agency, examining how filmmakers could get around the rules to unveil forbidden messages or sentiments. The study covers spy warfare and conspiracies, gods and monsters, repression and eros, revolution and violence, articulated in opera film, lyrical cinema, melodrama, ghost story, espionage, romantic comedy, realist drama, and revolutionary documentary. It charts the uneven paths of artists like Sit Kok-sin, Cai Chusheng, Fei Mu, Lee Sun-fung, Lee Tit, Ng Cho-fan, Bai Jingrui, Wang Tong, Tang Shu-shuen, Lee Bik-wah, Tsui Hark, Eileen Chang, and Michelangelo Antonioni, who contested the identity of Chineseness through engaging in the cinema of offense.
Based on a study of Liu Yichang’s writings for a US-financed literary tabloid, this chapter brings into focus the interplay between Cold War transnationalism and the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia, during the period when Hong Kong served as a key center for print media and publishing. It builds on pioneering studies of US-funded institutions and their mobilization of intermediaries, intellectuals, publishers and writers to participate in locally produced book and newspaper publication programs in an effort to contain communism. I examine how the localized texts with Nanyang flavors complicated the interplay of romance and politics in transnational Cold War culture. A detailed analysis of the production of individual cultural texts, however, indicates the intricacy of ideological impact, questioning the political efficacy of US propaganda efforts in seeking to shape an imagined “Free World” in Asia.